1. Field of the Invention
This invention generally relates to the use of hyperlinks and semantic links, and more specifically, the invention relates to the combination of hyperlinks and semantic links to enable a user to navigate through semantically related structures over which computational analysis can be done.
2. Background Art
The Internet is a fast growing and important communication medium. One integral and familiar aspect of utilizing the Internet is an application called a “browser”. This application, by reading hypertext and other related programming code and displaying corresponding text and graphics, allows virtually anyone interested in using the Internet to use this amazing tool easily and simply. One of the most used and familiar aspects of Internet browsers is the ability to click on a hyperlink in a hypertext environment and follow the link to additional hypertext.
A hyperlink is a connection between an element in a hypertext document, such as a word, a phrase, a symbol, or an image, and a different element in the document, another document, a file or a script. The user activates the link by clicking on the linked element, which is usually underlined or in a color different from the rest of the document to indicate that the element is linked. Without hyperlinks, the Internet could not be utilized by users with the ease, simplicity and speed that it is today. Hyperlinks are an inextricable part of the Internet browsing experience, and will be for the foreseeable future.
Hyperlinking, more generally, is a common technique for connecting documents in networked systems. Hyperlinks help users navigate rich content by making a connection between a source document element (e.g. a word, a phrase, or portion of an image) and a target document—and even to a specific location within the target document. The user traverses that connection through simple user gesture (such as a mouse click), easily navigating to the target. While many systems have been built over the past several decades of information systems research and development, none have taken hold as dramatically as the World Wide Web.
In these systems, the links serve navigational purposes only. Links often imply the existence of some kind of relationship between the source and target entity that the user will discover upon reading the text, looking at the picture, or navigating the link. However, there is no computer analyzable representation of the semantics of the relationship. It is simply a navigational link.
As an example, a web page about one of the inventors might state: “I work for IBM.” IBM could be a hyperlink to www.ibm.com, and a human reader will know that IBM is a company that employs the inventor. An important purpose is served—it is easy for the human reader to quickly move from a document about the inventor to one about his employer. However, the hyperlink conveys no information about the nature of the relationship between IBM and the inventor. A computer would only be able to ascertain the kind of relationship between inventor and company through techniques such as natural language analysis, which can be expensive and error-prone.
There have been other kinds of information technology systems, which allow the explicit representation of semantic relationships among entities. Semantic Networks (often represented with technology such as OWL or RDF) are a prime example. These systems represent the kind of relationship between two entities. These systems consist of ‘statements’, which encode relationships among entities. A statement such as (employs company—IBM inventor—Abrams) encodes the employment relationship between IBM and the inventor. Such relationships may be logically stored in a table that lists the pairs of objects that are connected by a specified type of relation in a given direction, along with other attributes of that relationship.
While hyperlinks help humans to navigate documents, semantic relationships help computers do analysis over structures.